Politics

FOCUS: Seymour Hersh's Memoir Is Full of Useful Reporting Secrets

Friday, 01 June 2018 11:05

Taibbi writes: "The best of his generation writes a how-to that undermines the industry of Access Journalism."

Seymour Hersh's memoir. (photo: AP)

Seymour Hersh's Memoir Is Full of Useful Reporting Secrets

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

01 June 18

The best of his generation writes a how-to that undermines the industry of Access Journalism

ate in his new memoir, Reporter, muckraking legend Seymour Hersh recounts an episode from a story he wrote for the New Yorker in 1999, about the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.

Bill Clinton was believed to be preparing a pardon for Pollard. This infuriated the rank and file of the intelligence community, who now wanted the press to know just what Pollard had stolen and why letting him free would be, in their eyes, an outrage.

"Soon after I began asking questions," Hersh writes, "I was invited by a senior intelligence official to come have a chat at CIA headquarters. I had done interviews there before, but always at my insistence."

He went to the CIA meeting. There, officials dumped a treasure trove of intelligence on his desk and explained that this material – much of which had to do with how we collected information about the Soviets – had been sold by Pollard to Israel.

On its face, the story was sensational. But Hersh was uncomfortable. "I was very ambivalent about being in the unfamiliar position of carrying water for the American intelligence community," he wrote. "I, who had worked so hard in my career to learn the secrets, had been handed the secrets."

This offhand line explains a lot about what has made Hersh completely embody what it means to be a reporter. The great test is being able to get information powerful people don't want you to have. A journalist who is handed something, even a very sensational something, should feel nervous, sick, ambivalent. Hersh never stopped feeling that way, remaining an iconoclast and a thorn in the side of officialdom to this day.

Hersh became famous in the late-'60s and early-'70s, at a time when the country was experiencing violent domestic upheaval and investigative reporters were for the first time celebrated like rock stars.

Hersh was best known back then for his reporting on American atrocities in Vietnam, in particular the massacre of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese in the village of My Lai. The story did a great deal to puncture the myth of American beneficence in Southeast Asia.

A significant theme of Hersh's work is that Americans are human beings, not immune from the horrific temptations of power that throughout history have afflicted and shamed those who have dominion over others.

For this, he has often been denounced as a traitor. In advance of a speech at Tulane in the wake of My Lai, for instance, the Times-Picayune called him a "communist sympathizer" and ran an editorial literally bordered in red protesting his appearance (de-platforming was a thing even then).

Being "more than a little pissed off at the cheap shot" (an unerring sense of pissed-off-edness is another of Hersh's gifts), he gave the speech at Tulane and decided to improvise "with a purpose in mind."

The room was full of Vietnam vets. Hersh asked if anyone in the audience had been a helicopter pilot in a certain Vietnamese province in 1968 or 1969. A man came onstage. Once Hersh reassured him that he had no interest in his name, he asked the soldier what chopper pilots sometimes did to "cope with the rage."

The soldier, while claiming he didn't do it personally, said he knew what Hersh was talking about. The practice involved spotting a civilian farmer on the way back after a mission, flying low and attempting to decapitate the fleeing figure with rotor blades. The crews would have to land short of the base to "wash the blood off the rotors."

"I did not like what I did to the vet, who was stunningly honest," he writes, "but I wanted to get back, in some way, at the Times-Picayune."

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post will be remembered by history as the "whiz kids" who cracked Watergate, but Hersh also wrote 40 front-page articles on the affair for the Times in the space of months. Many of those pieces "[moved] the needle closer to the president," as he puts it here.

Hersh and Woodward in particular will likely forever be linked in a Magic-Bird sort of way. The two reporters continued after the Vietnam and Watergate years to crank out heavy tomes full of secrets about everyone from Henry Kissinger (in Hersh's case) to CIA chief Bill Casey (in Woodward's), solidifying reputations as the country's top investigative reporters.

But Hersh and Woodward represented two starkly different approaches to the job. Woodward is the quintessential access journalist, able to write books like Bush at War that seem to place the reader practically inside the Oval Office during crucial moments in history.

But Woodward's information often came from the very celebrity politicians who were chief characters in these books. Piecing together these insider versions of history, probably recounted over expensive lunches off the Mall, was a more institutionalized version of "being handed the secrets."

Hersh, on the other hand, has had success mining the middle and lower ranks of agencies. He constantly keeps an eye out for sources among the lesser-known (but still powerful) officials who are leaving the game. Many of these techniques are detailed in Reporter.

"One of my quirks," he writes, "has been to keep track of the retirement of senior generals and admirals; those who did not get to the top invariably had a story to tell in explaining why."

He even watches for obituaries, which often let slip surprising information about the pasts of, say, deceased CIA operatives. And he will call wives or relatives and search for information that way.

Hersh, in other words, works from the edges inward, developing a grapevine of faceless sources that in turn generate rumors and stories of things he isn't supposed to know – a secret program to recover a sunken Russian submarine, an incident of soldiers using fire ants to torture a terror suspect – anything.

These techniques were very much on display during the post-9/11 years. Hersh put out a spate of some of the most impactful reporting on the War on Terror, lifting a lid on some of America's most barbaric practices. The Abu Ghraib stories were the best known, and the inside tale of how those came to light is told here.

Hersh learned a great deal from a three-day visit in Damascus with an Iraqi general who'd "retired" after the Iraq army was banned. The general was making a living selling vegetables from his garden when he decided to reach out to old U.N. contacts about troubling things he'd seen and heard about. This ex-general ended up in touch with Hersh and told many "sad tales, mostly secondhand, of the horrors of the American occupation."

He described American soldiers raiding houses and robbing the inhabitants (many Iraqis kept their savings in dollars). He described tales of arrestees who were set free for a kickback. And he told of a regime of abuse in American detention centers so horrific that men would "write to their fathers and brothers and beg them to come kill them in jail."

Much of this couldn't be confirmed easily, but the tales squared with reports from human rights groups. Besides, Hersh writes, "his account also smelled right" (having a sense of who is and is not lying is a key skill, often the difference between giving up and continuing to dig). Hersh kept at it and uncovered a key internal report about the abuse, and his New Yorker story was an international sensation that changed the course of another war.

An interesting side-note is that Hersh was instrumental in getting the story out before his own story ran. He knew that 60 Minutes had photos of the Abu Ghraib abuse and was "skittish" about publishing them "after being urged by the Bush administration not to do so." Hersh, in his inimitable pain-in-the-ass way, called a CBS producer on the story and essentially told her that if CBS didn't run the story soon, "I would have no choice but to write about the network's continuing censorship in the New Yorker."

The photos aired in the next 60 Minutes broadcast, and Dan Rather – who, Hersh knew, had been fighting to get the story out – made a point to say on air that CBS only published when they learned other media had the story.

"It wasn't hard to guess that he had been ordered to make such an asinine excuse for an important news story," Hersh writes.

Hersh was also among the first to describe a burgeoning American assassination program that to this day is poorly understood.

Within weeks of 9/11, for instance, Hersh quoted a "C.I.A. man" claiming the U.S. needed to "defy the American rule of law… We need to do this – knock them down one by one." He later reported on the existence of a "target list" and cited an order comparing the new tactics to El Salvadoran execution squads, reporting that much of this was going on without Congress being told.

Despite his reputation for irascibility and for troubled relationships with editors, it shines through in the book that he always felt tremendous loyalty to people like Abe Rosenthal of the Times and David Remnick of the New Yorker, and to the great organizations they represented.

But, as Hersh puts it in the end, "Investigative reporters wear out their welcome… Editors get tired of difficult stories and difficult reporters."

At the end of Reporter, he recounts his falling out with the New Yorker. Hersh says he became concerned when he heard Remnick was planning on writing a biography of new president Barack Obama.

Earlier in his career, Hersh himself had actually worked for the campaign of antiwar Democrat Eugene McCarthy. And he himself liked candidate Obama. But this was a church-and-state issue. He had a thing about wearing two hats at once.

Regarding Remnick's relationship to Obama, he writes:

"I had learned over the years never to trust the declared aspirations of any politician, and was also enough of a prude to believe that editors should not make friends with a sitting president."

Ultimately, Hersh and the New Yorker fell out over the story of the assassination of Osama bin Laden. The magazine – with the input of then-Obama counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan – ended up running the "inside" account of the operation much as the Obama administration has always told it.

Hersh, meanwhile, had sources indicating a very different version of bin Laden's end, one in which the U.S. killed bin Laden with the assent of the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI, which had had him in captivity for years.

In the end, Hersh was forced to publish his account in the London Review of Books, which is where he's been publishing on and off ever since.

The journalism business is undergoing radical changes. Media figures are more famous than ever before, but those with the biggest profiles tend to be associated with one particular political demographic.

The job in many quarters has devolved into feeding captive audiences a steady stream of revelations framed to fit their preconceived ideas about the world, in order to keep them coming back. From Fox to MSNBC, the slant of programming has become more predictable, because audiences hate surprises and dislike being challenged.

As Hersh puts it, in such an environment, one of the first casualties is investigative reporting, "with its high cost, unpredictable result, and its capacity for angering readers..."

Hersh's career is a tribute to the pursuit of the "unpredictable result." We used to value reporters who were willing to alienate editors and readers alike, if that's the way the truth cut. Now, as often as not, we just change the channel. This has been bad for both reporters and readers, who are losing the will to seek out and face the unpredictable truth.

When it comes time for the next generation of journalists to re-discover what this job is supposed to be about, they can at least read Reporter. It's all in here.

9 comments

The Case for Obstruction

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47190"><span class="small">James Risen, The Intercept</span></a>

Friday, 01 June 2018 08:42

Risen writes: "Mueller is approaching his Trump-Russia investigation in the same way he and his fellow Justice Department prosecutors went after Gotti and other mobsters."

President Donald Trump, center, shakes hands with James Comey, then director of the FBI. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Getty Images)

The Case for Obstruction

By James Risen, The Intercept

01 June 18

Given Trump�s conflicting explanations for firing former FBI Director James Comey, it may be difficult to prove his intent beyond a reasonable doubt.

ne of the most important things to understand about Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the Trump-Russia case, is that he helped nail New York mob boss John Gotti, the gangster known as the �Teflon Don.�

One of the most important things to understand about Donald Trump, the con man and hustler who happens to be president, is that he comes from the mob-tinged New York real estate industry and knows exactly what happened to Gotti and other mob bosses felled by racketeering prosecutions waged by the likes of Mueller.

Trump knows that Mueller is now conducting the same kind of racketeering investigation in the Trump-Russia case, and it frightens him.

Mueller is approaching his Trump-Russia investigation in the same way he and his fellow Justice Department prosecutors went after Gotti and other mobsters. He is rolling up Trump loyalists. He is slowly but surely climbing the ladder from low-level operatives to more prominent figures, and holding the threat of prison over their heads to get them to flip and talk about people higher up the ladder. Eventually, Mueller�s racketeering case will make its way to Trump.

Whenever Mueller seems to be making progress, Trump tries to distract. That is why a desperate Trump has been turning to crazed loyalists like Rudy Giuliani to go on cable news and spout incoherent attacks on the Mueller investigation. And it explains why Trump and his minions are now trying to focus the public�s attention on the FBI�s use of an informant to falsely claim that Trump was illegally spied on by the purported �deep state� during the 2016 campaign. To be sure, there is plenty of ugly history behind the FBI�s use of informants. In the 1960s, the FBI infiltrated the anti-war movement and other political organizations; more recently, it has used informants to entrap people in ginned-up terrorism cases.

But there is no evidence that the FBI engaged in any of those abusive tactics in the Trump-Russia investigation. Trump simply wants to depict himself as the victim of partisan intelligence operatives so that he can discredit and distract from Mueller�s actual investigation. It is the same kind of ploy he tried last year, when he claimed that he had been wiretapped.

In fact, the stunning number of very public actions taken by Trump to distract from or impede the Russia inquiry � a number that grows almost daily — suggests that he has been desperate to make the investigation go away from the moment it began.

I believe that it is obvious � and has been for more than a year � that Trump is doing everything he can to obstruct any investigation into evidence of collusion between his campaign and Russia in the 2016 presidential election. If that means discrediting the FBI, the Justice Department, and other government agencies, Trump will do it. He is quite willing to destroy crucial governmental checks and balances to impede the investigation.

This is my third column for The Intercept about the Trump-Russia case. Given all the conspiracy theories, false controversies, and Trump�s other efforts at distraction � which the media dutifully reports in mind-numbing detail in excruciatingly narrow and incremental stories � it is easy to lose the thread of the Trump-Russia narrative. My objective in this series of columns is to step back and look at the big picture.

While Trump tries to make you look the other way, I want to remind you of the big events, like the fact that Trump fired the FBI director to stop the Trump-Russia inquiry.

This third column is very straightforward. It is about whether Trump has attempted to impede the efforts, first by the FBI under then-Director James Comey and now by Mueller, to investigate whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians win the White House.

The answer, unequivocally, is yes.

There are many open questions about other aspects of the Trump-Russia narrative, but not about this. Trump has been trying to block the investigation from the very start. The only real questions about this aspect of the case are whether Trump�s efforts to impede the inquiry will meet the legal definition of obstruction of justice, whether he will be criminally charged with obstruction of justice, and whether he will face impeachment in Congress.

And one more: Will Trump fire Mueller if he thinks he is getting too close to making the case for obstruction?

Trump�s efforts to derail the investigation have been very public and are becoming increasingly unbalanced.

Trump�s current focus on what he calls �Spygate� is straight from the playbook he has been using since the investigation began. He is trying to distract the public from the substance of the investigation by publicly spouting conspiracy theories and other wild claims.

During the 2016 campaign, the FBI asked Stefan Halper, an American who was an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge, to act as an informant in its fledgling investigation of Russian election interference and possible ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Halper, a former Republican operative, was asked by the FBI to talk to Trump foreign policy advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, both of whom the bureau believed were in contact with the Russian government.

Halper�s informal talks with the Trump advisers don�t seem to have yielded much. But press reports about his role as an FBI informant gave Trump and his loyalists fresh ammunition to attack the FBI.

Trump purposefully and falsely branded Halper as a �spy� planted inside his campaign. To sway public opinion, he tried to make Halper�s role and the FBI�s inquiry sound far more nefarious than it was.

Giuliani recently acknowledged in a television interview that Trump and his camp are waging a battle to discredit Mueller�s investigation if the case ends up going to Congress for impeachment proceedings, which are, by definition, political and subject to the whims of public opinion. �Eventually, the decision here is going to be: impeach [or] not impeach. Members of Congress, Democrats, and Republicans are going to be informed a lot by their constituents. So our jury … is the American people. And the American people … Republicans largely, independents pretty substantially, and even Democrats, now question the legitimacy of [Mueller�s probe],� Giuliani said on CNN last weekend.

Trump so successfully cast the Halper episode as a right-wing fever dream that congressional Republicans demanded briefings on Halper�s role in the investigation. The FBI and the Justice Department gave in and agreed to brief some Democrats as well. Afterward, like so many Trump conspiracy theories before it, the Halper case began to fizzle. Most Republicans had little to say, while Democrats said the briefings showed that there was no substance to Trump�s charges. Eventually, even some Republicans began to break with Trump on the Halper matter. Sen. Marco Rubio acknowledged that there was no evidence that the FBI had been spying on the Trump campaign. Most surprisingly, Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican and Draco Malfoy lookalike who has long been one of the GOP�s leading conspiracy theorists, now says that the FBI�s use of Halper was appropriate.

�Spygate� is just the latest in a long string of actions by Trump designed to impede the investigation.

Before Mueller, Trump went after Comey when he was running the Russia investigation. Like Mueller, Comey quickly came to see Trump�s similarity to the mob bosses that he had pursued as a prosecutor in New York, particularly after Trump began trying to pressure Comey to do his bidding.

Unlike the close-mouthed Mueller, Comey has been very public and explicit in comparing Trump to a mobster. In his recent memoir, Comey describes one meeting with Trump this way: �As I was sitting there, the strangest image filled my mind. I kept pushing it away because it seemed too odd and too dramatic, but it kept coming back: I thought of New York Mafia social clubs, an image from my days as a Manhattan federal prosecutor in the 1980s and 1990s. The Ravenite. The Palma Boys. Cafe Giardino. I couldn�t shake the picture. And looking back, it wasn�t as odd and dramatic as I thought it was at the time.�

The Trump-Comey relationship got off to a rocky start, when Comey had to brief the president-elect on the contents of the infamous Steele dossier. Comey told Trump about an unconfirmed allegation included in the dossier that during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, Trump had spent a night at the Ritz Carlton with prostitutes and been filmed by Russian intelligence. Days later, after BuzzFeed published the dossier, Trump called Comey to vent about it.

About two weeks later, on January 27, 2017, Trump again called Comey and asked him to come to the White House for dinner that night. When Comey arrived, he discovered that he was the only guest.

Over dinner, Trump asked Comey whether he wanted to stay on as FBI director. Since Trump had previously asked him the same thing, and Comey had already told him that he did, Comey rightly suspected that this was a veiled threat.

�Now it was pretty clear to me what was happening,� Comey writes in his book. �The setup of the dinner, both the physical layout of a private meal and Trump�s pretense that he had not already asked me to stay on multiple occasions, convinced me this was an effort to establish a patronage relationship.�

�I expect loyalty,� Trump told him over dinner.

Comey says he responded: �You will always get honesty from me.�

Comey came away from the dinner feeling like he had just met with a Mafia boss who was trying to strong-arm him.

On February 14, Comey met Trump again at the White House, this time with a group of other officials. At the end of the meeting, Trump asked Comey to stay behind for a private talk. When everyone else had left the room, Trump told Comey that he wanted to talk about Gen. Michael Flynn, his onetime national security adviser, who had resigned the day before amid questions about his contacts with Russia and for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about them.

Trump told Comey that Flynn hadn�t done anything wrong in his dealings with the Russians, and then made a statement that sounded to the FBI director a lot like an effort to obstruct justice: �I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.�

Comey says he replied only that Flynn was �a good guy,� but did not say that he would let the matter go.

�At the time, I had understood the president to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December,� Comey writes in his book. �I did not understand the president to be talking about the broader investigation into Russia or possible links to his campaign. Regardless, it was very concerning, given the FBI�s role as an independent investigative agency. Imagine the reaction if a President Hillary Clinton had asked to speak to the FBI director alone and urged him to back off the investigation of her national security advisor.�

On March 30, Trump called Comey and told him that the Russia investigation, then being run by the FBI, was a �cloud� over his presidency, and asked what could be done to �lift the cloud.� Trump also asked him to make public the fact that Trump was not personally under investigation, which Comey had previously told him privately.

On April 11, Trump called Comey again and made another veiled threat, saying: �I have been very loyal to you, very loyal. We had that thing, you know.� This was apparently a reference to their dinner in which Trump had demanded Comey�s loyalty.

On May 9, 2017, Trump fired Comey in the midst of the FBI�s investigation of evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. It was the most public and consequential action taken by Trump in the growing obstruction case against him. It ultimately led to Mueller�s appointment as special counsel to conduct an independent investigation into the Trump-Russia case.

At first, Trump suggested that a Justice Department memo criticizing Comey for his handling of the Clinton email investigation prompted the firing. But Trump couldn�t control himself and soon admitted to a television reporter that he was really thinking of �this Russia thing� when he fired the FBI director.

The day after he fired Comey, Trump told visiting Russian officials: �I faced great pressure because of Russia. That�s taken off,� according to a memo describing the discussion.

During those early months, Comey wasn�t the only person Trump sought to pressure on the Russia investigation.

In March 2017, before he fired Comey, Trump asked two top intelligence officials � the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, and NSA Director Mike Rogers � to say publicly that they saw no evidence that the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians. Both declined.

After he was fired, Comey decided he would go to the press, at least indirectly. He used a law professor friend as an intermediary. The friend told the New York Times about Trump�s efforts to obstruct justice by pressuring Comey to drop the investigation of Flynn. The resulting media firestorm prompted Rosenstein to appoint Mueller to investigate the Trump-Russia case. Rosenstein�s decision so angered Trump that he has reportedly wanted to fire him ever since.

Trump also wanted to fire Mueller almost as soon as he was appointed. He was only stopped when his own White House counsel said he would quit rather than carry out the order.

Trump has gone to great lengths to quash the investigation, even getting directly involved in crafting a misleading statement to the press about the purpose of a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between a Russian lawyer, Donald Trump Jr., and campaign officials. The meeting was designed to get dirt on Clinton, but the press statement said it was about Russian adoption policy.

It seems unlikely that Mueller will seek to criminally charge and prosecute a sitting president. But if Mueller writes a report to Congress that could be used in impeachment proceedings, there is historical precedent for a focus on obstruction. During Watergate, the first count in the impeachment proceedings of Richard Nixon included charges of obstruction of justice.

The big question in this case will be whether Trump�s actions meet the legal definition of obstruction. As president, he has the power to hire and fire senior officials, like the FBI director. And given all of Trump�s various early explanations, including the laughable notion that he fired Comey because of his handling of the Clinton email case (which, incidentally, almost certainly helped Trump win the election), it may be difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt what exactly drove him to fire Comey. Trump has been so public and said so many contradictory things that it will also be difficult to parse his words and intent on many other actions.

What�s more, if Mueller gets enough evidence to make an obstruction case against Trump but still can�t prove the underlying case of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, the obstruction case will ring hollow. Trump�s supporters will almost certainly rally to him, claiming he is just being punished for his efforts to fight back against a partisan takedown.

It�s important to remember what Trump thinks of his voters and how strongly he believes they will always side with him. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump said: �I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn�t lose any voters, OK? It�s, like, incredible.�

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Grieving Dad: US Drone Killed My Son in Yemen, and Trump Has Yet to Offer an Apology

Friday, 01 June 2018 08:30

Excerpt: "An American drone killed my son Mohammed Saleh al-Manthari. One day in March, without warning, it appeared in the sky and killed him."

Graffiti in Yemen. (photo: Yahya Arhab/EPA)

Grieving Dad: US Drone Killed My Son in Yemen, and Trump Has Yet to Offer an Apology

By Al Haj Saleh Mohammed and Saleh Al-Manthari, New York Daily News

01 June 18

n American drone killed my son Mohammed Saleh al-Manthari. One day in March, without warning, it appeared in the sky and killed him.

I have not been told why. He was never charged with nor convicted of a crime. No one has apologized to us or sought to repair the damage caused by my son's killing. Now, I wonder whether the U.S. government even cares about the harm it is causing in Yemen.

President Trump refused to comply with an order requiring him to report the deaths of my family to Congress. Instead, he said the requirement to publish the numbers of civilians killed in U.S. counterterrorism operations was "under review" and any report wouldn't be delivered until June 1, at the earliest.

My question to the President is: Will my son be included in your report to Congress? You may not think he matters, but I and others do. And every time you justify his killing, it is like you kill him all over again.

On March 29, my son and several others were driving toward the city of Al Samw'ah, in Al Bayda Governorate in Yemen, to pick up an elder to act as a witness in a land sale in a nearby village. At approximately 2 p.m., a U.S. drone opened fire on their vehicle. Three people were killed, including my son. Two others were injured. One of them later succumbed to his injuries.

The U.S. military claimed responsibility for the attack. It alleged that the strike killed four terrorists. This is untrue.

My son was not a member of Al Qaeda. He was a simple person, a family man. After serving in Yemen's military, he became a night guard for a local gas station. He was a law-abiding citizen who never thought ill of the United States. In fact, he rarely thought of the U.S. at all.

In killing him, America has robbed three children � 1-year-old Maha, 3-year-old Faiz and 6-year-old Ahmed � of their father. He was the only breadwinner in his family. He used to earn 35,000 Yemeni riyals (about $140) a month.

Who will support them now? Who will provide young Ahmed with an education?

This is the Mantharis' Toyota after it was hit in the drone strike. pic.twitter.com/RmujTFp5um
— Adam Rawnsley (@arawnsley) May 7, 2018

Nor were any of the other passengers in the vehicle members of Al Qaeda. One of them � my brother Salem Mohammed al-Manthari � was the head of the public transport workers' union in Aden. Another was a migrant worker returning from Saudi Arabia to visit his family.

After the strike, tribal leaders issued a statement condemning it and affirming that the victims were not members of Al Qaeda. They would only do so if they were absolutely certain the dead men had no ties to the terrorist group.

The U.S. military says it will be conducting a review of what happened. We have offered to provide evidence and to speak with anyone who will listen. Will they take us up on our offer? Will they hear me speak about the impact the death of my son and my brother has had on our family? I hope they will � but I am not optimistic. America has not demonstrated to the Yemeni public that it cares when innocent people are killed.

Numbers without names are meaningless to us. The province I live in has suffered enormously at the hands of Americans. Drones have rained missile after missile. Soldiers invaded our villages and homes in the dead of night, killing our children.

But we do not seek retribution. We want justice.

When U.S. drones killed two Western hostages, Giovanni Lo Porto and Warren Weinstein, President Barack Obama publicly apologized for their deaths.

Yet no Yemeni drone victim has ever received an apology. It seems the lives of Yemenis are not worth saying sorry for.

An apology will not bring back our dead. But it will help us achieve closure and restore our dignity. It is the right thing to do. It is what we teach our children to do when they make mistakes. If we do not admit our mistakes, we cannot hope to avoid them in future.

Will Trump acknowledge his mistake when he reports to Congress? I regret to say I don't expect it. When will he acknowledge the drone strikes are killing not just "bad guys" but many innocents as well? Until he does, the drones will continue killing the wrong people, and with them, any chance we have of rebuilding our lives and our community.

2 comments

The Russian Opposition Journalist Who Faked His Own Assassination

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=46742"><span class="small">Masha Gessen, The New Yorker</span></a>

Thursday, 31 May 2018 13:16

Gessen writes: "To make sense of this bizarre story, one has to understand three things: what made Babchenko a target, why the assassination attempt failed, and what happens now."

The Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko appeared at a press conference after faking his own assassination as part of a sting operation in cooperation with Ukrainian law enforcement. (photo: Sergei Supinsky/Getty)

The Russian Opposition Journalist Who Faked His Own Assassination

By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

31 May 18

n Tuesday, I wrote a column remembering Arkady Babchenko, the Russian journalist who had been reported murdered in Kyiv earlier that day. It began, �I have lost count of the number of political assassinations I have had to write about in the past twenty years. As shocking as the murders feel to me, they have almost ceased being news. .?.?. [Babchenko] was not the first Russian journalist to be killed. He was not the first Russian exile to be killed. He was not even the first Russian opposition journalist living in exile in Kyiv to be killed there in broad daylight. Nor was he the first Russian opposition journalist to be shot dead as he came home from a store.�

Just as the column was about to be posted, news came that Babchenko was alive. He appeared at a press conference in Kyiv, saying that he had faked his death as part of a sting operation to catch his own would-be killers. Here, finally, was a Russian assassination story with a surprise twist. In Moscow, a placard commemorating Babchenko was removed from the fa�ade of the House of Journalists. At the editorial offices of Novaya Gazeta, to which Babchenko used to contribute, a memorial bouquet was dismantled, and each of the women in the office got a rose. Commemorative events in Moscow and Kyiv turned into celebrations. Babchenko, who had already had the opportunity to read dozens of his own obituaries, was expected to attend his own memorial celebration in Kyiv�s central square.

To make sense of this bizarre story, one has to understand three things: what made Babchenko a target, why the assassination attempt failed, and what happens now.

Babchenko, who is forty-one, came to journalism from the Army. He was shipped to fight in the Russian war in Chechnya as a nineteen-year-old conscript, in 1995; when Moscow launched its second offensive against the rebellious region, in 1999, Babchenko signed up to fight again. When he returned to Moscow, he started writing, working as a war correspondent for a succession of Moscow publications. He covered the Russian wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and, eventually, Ukraine. He also wrote fiction about the war in Chechnya. He began identifying as a pacifist, and swore never to pick up a gun again. He also covered natural disasters in Russia and uprisings abroad. In 2013, he was detained and beaten by Turkish police while filming protests in Istanbul.

During the mass demonstrations against falsified elections in Russia in 2011 and 2012, Babchenko, who was an active and vocal participant, wrote a blog post in which he called on protesters to resist police and to set up camp instead of dispersing. For this post, he faced charges of attempting to incite a riot, but they were eventually dropped. During the political crackdown that began after Vladimir Putin officially took the office of President for the third time, in May, 2012, many of the activists affiliated with the protests were forced to leave the country, while several others were jailed, and one�Boris Nemtsov�was killed. Babchenko complained that he no longer had anyone to talk to or any publications in which to publish his articles, but he stayed in Moscow.

It wasn�t until February, 2017, that a combination of threats�of legal persecution and death�forced Babchenko to leave Russia. He first went to Prague, then to Tel Aviv, where I saw him in June of last year. I was on a reporting trip in Israel, spending most of my evenings at a caf� recently opened by new political exiles from Russia. A small crowd of similarly new arrivals gathered there every night, and Babchenko was always among them, chain-smoking, sometimes reporting back on his fruitless negotiations with the local authorities. Like many people in that crowd, he seemed shell-shocked and uncertain of who he was, or where. His journalism was now confined to his blog. He called it �journalism without mediators,� and he encouraged readers to make any payments they saw fit. Every post was accompanied by information on how to make a contribution. One evening, I didn�t find him at the caf�, and the owner told me that he had left the country. We later learned that he had decided to move to Kyiv, where he continued to write about Russian politics and, especially, the Russian war against Ukraine, making it clear in every post that his sympathies, and now his loyalty, were with Ukraine. Sometimes he mentioned getting death threats, which he believed were linked directly to the Putin administration.

On Tuesday, Babchenko posted a photo of a helicopter on his blog. The caption explained that on this day, many years ago, a commanding officer denied him a seat on that helicopter, which was shot down less than an hour later. �Since then, I consider May 29th to be my second birthday,� he wrote. In another few hours, news broke that Babchenko had died after being shot in the back three times as he returned to his Kyiv apartment from a store.

According to officials who spoke in Kyiv on Wednesday, Russian secret police hired a Ukrainian citizen to find someone who would kill Babchenko. This middleman, who has been identified only by the initial G., contacted several veterans of the Russian-Ukrainian war, offering thirty thousand dollars for the hit, and one of these men reported the conversation to law enforcement. A month ago, the security services contacted Babchenko to begin setting up a sting operation.

The details of the sting are not entirely certain, but it appears that a man co�perating with the investigation posed as the assassin. Babchenko�s wife informed a journalist friend that Babchenko had been shot and was pronounced dead in the ambulance. She described having heard three loud claps and running out of the bathroom to find her husband in a pool of blood; it�s not clear whether the sting operation involved actually faking the murder or merely reporting that it had taken place, though a photo of Babchenko�s supposed body did circulate. (It�s also unclear whether Babchenko�s wife knew of the operation.) The next day, law-enforcement spokespeople announced that Babchenko was alive and that the middleman had already been arrested. It appeared that May 29th had become not only Babchenko�s second birthday but also his third.

Ukrainian security services claim to have proof that the middleman was hired by their Russian counterpart, the F.S.B. Babchenko offered one piece of evidence: the ostensible assassin, he said, had been shown a photograph of Babchenko taken twenty-five years ago, when he obtained his first internal passport. (At the time, the document, a sort of universal domestic I.D., was issued three times in a Russian citizen�s life: at sixteen, twenty-five, and forty-five.) Babchenko claims that the photo could be obtained only from security-service files. If he is right, then he is also providing evidence of the F.S.B.�s glaring incompetence: a twenty-five-year-old photo wouldn�t be of use for an assassin trying to identify his mark, nor would it be necessary, considering that contemporary pictures of Babchenko are numerous and easy to find.

The official Russian reaction to Babchenko�s resurrection and Kyiv�s accusations has so far been limited to a statement by the foreign-ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who said, �That Babchenko is alive is the best news. That�s what should always happen. Too bad other times it wasn�t a masquerade.� Zakharova�s trademark tone of generalized mockery can serve as a preview of Russia�s future reaction to the case. Moscow officials will surely deny all involvement, boast that if they had wanted to kill Babchenko they�d have found a way, and stress that Kyiv undermined its own credibility by faking an assassination.

The world�s two largest journalist-safety organizations are angry. Reporters Without Borders condemned the sting for misleading the public. The Committee to Protect Journalists has demanded that Kyiv explain why deception was necessary and unavoidable. Babchenko said on Wednesday that �there were no other options.�

Whether or not there were indeed other options for apprehending G., the story of the staged murder of a journalist will make it easier for dictators to cast any future murders of reporters as �fake news.� But that doesn�t make the threat Babchenko faced any less real.

8 comments

What Fossil Fuels and Factory Farms Have in Common

Thursday, 31 May 2018 13:02

Hauter writes: "It's a familiar story in other rural communities - from Pennsylvania to Montana and Texas - where fracking has contaminated drinking water resources and emitted toxic air pollution associated with higher rates of asthma, birth defects, and cancer. But the story is similar in other communities where fracking or other extreme fossil fuel extraction isn't happening."

Like the fossil fuel cartel, the highly consolidated factory farm industry prioritizes profits at the cost of our environment. (photo: Robyn Beck/Getty)

What Fossil Fuels and Factory Farms Have in Common

By Wenonah Hauter, YES! Magazine

31 May 18

Hint: They�re both issues of environmental injustice.

n 2008, Cabot Oil and Gas started fracking operations in Dimock, Pennsylvania. It was around that time the community started noticing their water was turning brown and making people and animals sick. One woman�s water well exploded. Fracking had come to town.

It�s a familiar story in other rural communities�from Pennsylvania to Montana and Texas�where fracking has contaminated drinking water resources and emitted toxic air pollution associated with higher rates of asthma, birth defects, and cancer.

But the story is similar in other communities where fracking or other extreme fossil fuel extraction isn�t happening. Air and drinking water that�s been dangerously polluted from industrial operations affect communities across Iowa, including the state�s largest city, Des Moines. Polluting facilities are operating in Central Oregon, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Maryland. None of those places are fracking, but they are host to another environmental hazard facing rural communities: factory farms.

Like the fossil fuel cartel, this highly consolidated industry prioritizes profits at the cost of our environment. Factory farms are an industrial model for producing animals for food where thousands of cows, pigs, or birds are raised in confinement in a small area. While farms can and do apply manure as a fertilizer to cropland, factory farms produce more manure than nearby fields can absorb, leading to runoff into surface waters and contaminants leaching into groundwater. And storing concentrated quantities of manure releases toxins like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide into the air, threatening nearby communities�and even leading to worker deaths. The nearly half a million dairy cows on factory farms in Tulare County, California, produce five times as much waste as the New York City metropolitan area and carries chemical additives and pathogens like E. coli, many of which are antibiotic resistant.

Factory farms are also an issue of environmental injustice. In North Carolina counties that contain hog factory farms, schools with larger percentages of students of color, and those with greater shares of students receiving free lunches are located closer to hog farms than whiter and more affluent schools. Just like with fossil fuel infrastructure, these toxic facilities are more likely to be in places that are least able to resist their development.

Another thing factory farms have in common with fossil fuels: They are a danger to the climate. Livestock production contributes 14.5 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Methane emissions from the digestive processes of cattle contribute 39 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from livestock production, and manure storage and processing contribute 10 percent. Additionally, monoculture crops like corn and soy are a hallmark of our highly consolidated food system and are one of the reasons we can raise mass quantities of livestock. These crops contribute nearly half of the emissions from the sector. Meanwhile, more sustainable meat production methods like smaller farms and grass-fed operations may have lower greenhouse gas emissions than factory farms. Without a rapid transition away from factory farming, we will not avoid catastrophic climate change.

Yet attempts to regulate factory farms have been weak-kneed and ineffective. For example, federal law requires they report significant releases of toxic pollutants like ammonia. But the Environmental Protection Agency actually does little to monitor, much less prevent, these emissions. In 2009, for example, the agency rolled back regulations so that only the largest facilities had to report these emissions�and only to local, not national, emergency response officials. In 2018 Congress went even further, granting an exemption from reporting requirements for air emissions created by manure on farms. Similarly, the EPA does not collect comprehensive data on factory farm size or location, making oversight impossible. And while the Clean Water Act regulates water pollution from industrial facilities, the EPA has looked the other way; the agency estimated in 2011 that less than half of the facilities required to get discharge permits had actually obtained them.

Calls to ban fracking have been proliferating since we have found that it is too dangerous to simply regulate. The inherent risks to our environment, our climate, and our communities are simply too much.

Now, we need to say the same thing about factory farms. Both industries are putting rural communities at risk so that large polluting companies can become larger and more profitable. Climate advocates who are already facing down the fossil fuel industry should find common cause with those who are fighting to stop industrial agriculture in their community.

Systemic change is needed. We can�t shop our way out of the damage that is being done to our environment by simply choosing to reduce meat consumption or ride bikes to work. While these are meaningful steps, we must also demand policy action. It�s time to reverse the decades of pro-industry policy that have made Big Ag and Big Energy bigger and badder, and create policies that start phasing out pollution from agriculture and energy.

We know how to do it: We need to demand meaningful laws and regulations�including bans on new polluting factory farms and fossil fuel infrastructure�that prioritize people over profit. This is already happening at the state level in places like Iowa, but we need to work at all levels, starting now, to enact the changes we need to protect our environment, our water, and our communities.

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